


The Heart of the Lion Clan

by keerawa



Category: King and Lionheart - Of Monsters and Men (Music Video)
Genre: Aliens, Canon-Typical Violence, Crueltide, Dark, Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Illnesses, Oral History, Post-Apocalypse, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28184505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa
Summary: For the rest of his life, Llew would travel from one clan to the next, telling the tale of the People of the Fallen Star.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Heart of the Lion Clan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dance_across](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dance_across/gifts).



> Thanks to my beta, Karios.

I looked up from my bowl of stew to see a bright red star streaking across the night sky. I pointed it out to my sister, urging her to make a wish.

Gwen grinned at me, put aside her licked-clean bowl and focused her keen eyes on the star, lips moving as she whispered her wish to the ancestors.

The star came closer - there was a sharp double bang. Loud as thunder, it echoed from the mountains. I heard screams and cries from the people of the clan. Cai shouted for the children to take shelter in the caves. The star disappeared from view to the north-east. 

Gwen looked up at me. “Llew, I think it landed in the city. We have to go see!”

Gwen hurried to inform the council of elders.

I had been appointed Keeper of the machines this past spring. Predicting that the council would grant permission to track down the fallen star, I lit a hot peat fire and began filling the great balloon of our clan’s flying ship. As it filled, I found and mended a tiny rip in the fabric.

We’d had two flying ships when I was a boy, a source of great prestige and wealth for the Lion Clan. The other had been lost on a trading expedition to the distant Orca Clan. Gwen was trained to pilot the ship, and none of the other clans lived closer to the great ruined city. If the elders allowed Gwen to fly it on this hunting expedition, we would certainly beat the other clans to the site.

The elders were divided as to whether the falling star was an omen of great promise or disaster, but they granted permission. Our Lionesses, cunning hunters and warriors, went to investigate. They came back two days later. 

The hunters returned to our village with two strangers, pale and red-clad like a story from the Scriptures. One was a young woman of great beauty; the other an innocent boy. They spoke words we did not recognize, in the tones of a songbird. We welcomed them as angels come down from heaven. 

We were wrong.

Gwen, eyes bright with excitement, told me of the wonder they had found - a new tower, higher than all the others, eclipsing the dim-blue lights that had always warned our clan away. Later that night she grew quiet and secretive, and left the clan's celebration for her cabin. I suspected she was ill. Gwen had always refused to admit to fear or weakness, even as a child. 

I sought her out at noon the next day to find her still asleep in her bed. Gwen was tossing and turning, moaning piteously, her skin dry with fever. I tried washing her face and head with cool water – her short-cropped hair pulled away from her head under my gentle fingers. She could not keep down any food, not even a simple broth.

For days, our healer tried to treat her sickness. None of his herbal remedies could bring down Gwen’s fever. Cai, our shaman, spent hours sitting cross-legged beside her bed, singing and praying. He finally told me she had gone beyond his reach, lost in dark dreams.

In desperation, I brought the woman, the angel, to my sister’s cabin.

She knelt by my sister with a look of great sadness upon her face. She spoke to Gwen, a hushed trilling whisper, and pressed her mouth to Gwen’s dry lips. I saw something – the tiniest flash of light, not red like firelight but the soft pink of dawn. 

The woman sat back. Gwen gave a last shuddering sigh; her face went slack and her eyes opened, blank and empty. Dead.

My voice was hoarse with tears that night as I spoke before the council fire, telling the elders what I had seen. “She stole Gwen’s soul,” I concluded. “The stranger is no angel, but a demon.”

“There are no demons, Llew,” said my grandmother, Bethan. 

“There were,” I insisted. “Angels and demons fought a great battle in the sky. It lasted for seven days and seven nights. They smote the city into ruin with their magics before the Great Darkness came. That is in the Scriptures. It is truth.”

“It is truth,” echoed the council.

“This young woman and her boy cannot be demons,” Bethan said. “They fit the description of the angels perfectly – pale and slim, bearing the holy scars that now we use to mark our shaman in their honor. They even dress as the ancient ones did.”

“And yet the Scriptures are silent when they might have described the demons, the ancient enemy. What if they were fallen angels, as like to the angels as the Bear Clan are to us?”

There was a sudden murmur of talk, some agreeing with me, others doubting.

“Blasphemy,” hissed old Lowri, and the council fell silent. She was half-blind and long past the time when she had led our clan in war, but her voice was still most respected in council. “He is mad with grief from his sister’s death. We will speak no more of this.”

And so we did not speak of it.

We did not speak as Nia, the leader of the Lionesses, grew weak and took to her bed. We did not speak of it when she died. At least, not in council. Many were the whispers as our Lionesses, the pride of the clan, fell ill one by one. I warned their families to keep the strangers away from their death beds. Some listened. Some did not. 

The strangers were wary now. They could see that the clan was turning against them. We followed the law of hospitality enough that the strangers were fed and sheltered, but the one that appeared to be a child was no longer welcomed to play with the children. The woman’s clumsy efforts to prepare the meals were rebuffed.

We woke one morning to find the strangers gone. Their tracks led north-east, back to the city and their fallen star.

“It is for the best,” old Lowri said. “Angels or demons, they return from whence they came, and will bring no more harm to the clan.”

“They escape with my sister’s stolen soul,” I protested. “And what of the other Lionesses we have buried since the clan welcomed them? If the strangers took all of their ghosts with them, how will the Lion Clan endure? Our children, and our children’s children, cannot survive without the spirits of their ancestors to guide and keep them!”

The elders would not listen.

As I stormed away, Cai caught me by the shoulder. “As Keeper of the machines, it is your responsibility to constantly maintain and test the clan’s machines,” he murmured. “Perhaps, in this time of grief, a number of young men would welcome a training exercise to the north-east?”

The death of the Lionesses had left many strong young men angry and grieving. I was able to recruit twenty, husbands and brothers of the lost. We left immediately after the noon meal. My grandmother stood on the top of the hillside and watched us depart, her ancient wrinkled hand shading the bright winter sun from her eyes, until we were out of view. 

In our flying ship we were able to sight the strangers from the air and captured them the next day, dangerously near the city. We were uncertain how to make them give up the souls they had stolen. If we killed them, would the Lionesses’ souls return to the ancestors, or be lost forever? 

“Isolation and exile are the penalty for the greatest crimes,” Cai said. “Separate them. Place the small one in a cage of iron, the woman in the oubliette. Give them no food or water. They will return the souls to us or die alone.”

We agreed this was wisdom, and so it was done.

I volunteered to guard the woman in the oubliette. While we were eating that evening, she escaped somehow. She fled from us through the woods, back towards the city. I could see my sister’s spirit, in the form of her rabbit totem, guiding and protecting the stranger. It grieved me that her howling ghost would side with the demon against her own people; she must possess a dark and terrible magic. The ghost led her to a chasm, the only bridge that crossed it long broken. I hoped that it had led her into a trap, but Gwen’s ghost, pink and curling through the air, bridged the gap for her, leaving us behind.

“Gwen!” I called out. “Don’t leave us. The clan needs you. I need you!”

The ghost paused, trembling in the growing darkness on the far side of the chasm as the demon ran away into the forest. Then it looped back towards me, gleaming in the twilight. As it flowed into my mouth I felt my sister’s sorrow.

We heard a great rumble. In the distance, the tallest tower of the city launched up into the air. A great cloud of smoke and an eerie red-yellow glow came from its base and the eyes of the faces carved into its sides. I heard a cry like that of a great bird, cut short. 

The men we retrieved from the city had lost the small demon; it escaped back to the sky in its own flying ship. They reported that the woman bled blue like the warning lights of the city, but died quick enough when pierced by a sword.

We returned to our village. The elders debated long into the night; given that I had returned with Gwen’s spirit, they decided not to punish the men who had joined me in pursuit of the strangers. Over the long cold winter months, one after another of those men fell to the demon’s curse, just as the Lionesses had before us.

I survived. Cai and the rest did not. I resigned as Keeper of the machines, passing the duties on to Iwan, my young apprentice. I left the village and began my journey to all of the clans surrounding the city, and then all the ones down the ancient road towards the sea, telling my tale. Warning them of the People of the Fallen Star, and the death they had brought to the Lion Clan.

* * *

> **Scouting Report, planet IGb2**  
>    
>  The native spirit is still a viable energy source, but they have sunk from a previous 5C tech level down to 2D since the last war.   
>    
>  We were originally welcomed. Long-term social conditioning appears intact.  
>  However, the dirty savages turned on us when we harvested the spirits of those who died to residual radiation.  
>  This one’s mother, Scout L-gretta deASha’natt, was killed by the natives in performance of her duty. 
> 
> If future expeditions are necessary, they should be prepared to use full force on the native population to enforce harvesting rights.  
>    
>  \- Acting Scout Ak-king deASha’natt


End file.
